HM Airship R101, the technological wonder of its day, set off from Cardington in Bedfordshire, on 4 October 1930, bound for Karachi on its first international flight, with Lord Thomson, Ramsay MacDonald’s Secretary of State for Air and other eminent passengers on board. Crowds watched it sail gracefully over London, but over northern France, it went into a fatal nose dive. Of the 54 passengers and crew, 46 were killed outright, and two died from their injuries.

Is there something wrong with David Cameron’s face that makes him unable to grow a moustache? It is a question that sprouts on the lips of journalists each November, because this is the month when men make themselves look hideous in a good cause: raising awareness of testicular cancer.

Norman Baker has been making use of the freedom of Parliament’s backbenches since he resigned his old job as a Home Office minister. Today, the Lib Dem MP took advantage of health questions in the Commons to put the case for legalising the use of cannabis for medical purposes.

Labour’s last day of campaigning in the Rochester by-election would have gone better if Emily Thornberry, MP for Islington South, had not turned to help. Out on the stomp, she was so taken by a house decked in three St George flags, with a white van parked outside, that she took a picture and posted it on Twitter, with the caption “Image from Rochester.”

“I came from a poor Irish, not particularly well educated background… I am in fact ‘a pleb’,” Bob Geldof said in evidence in the Old Bailey libel trial on behalf of his friend, former Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell.